RRND Email Full Text (Scheduled)

  • MN: Feds raid businesses in Minnesota fraud investigation

    Source: CNN

    “A long-running investigation of fraud involving federal funding in Minnesota entered a new, highly visible phase Tuesday morning as uniformed law enforcement agents executed search warrants in the Minneapolis area. Twenty-two federal search warrants were executed in Minnesota, a federal official told CNN. Most of the locations were businesses that are recipients of Medicaid funding, including child care facilities, according to CNN affiliate KARE, citing unnamed sources. The raids dealt with allegations of fraud, the Department of Homeland Security said.” (04/28/26)

    https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/28/us/minnesota-fraud-investigation


  • OK, “Gun Control” Had Its Chance — Here Are The Results

    Source: Garrison Center
    by Thomas L Knapp

    “‘Gun control’ had chance after chance after chance to prove it could thwart Allen’s plans. And. It. Didn’t. Whoa … violent criminals don’t obey ‘gun control’ laws and private venue gun rules any more than they obey other kinds of laws and rules? Whodathunkit? It’s not that the laws and rules aren’t adequately enforced. The only way to reliably prevent Allen from traveling from LA to DC with guns would have been to force him to travel on foot and buck naked … after which he’d have almost certainly been able to buy a gun on the street if he wanted one.” (04/28/26)

    https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/20558

  • Free Speech is About Individual Liberty, Not Viewpoint Discrimination

    Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
    by Wanjiru Njoya

    “Supreme Court rulings are significant not only for their decision on who wins, but also for their reasoning. A victory for common sense may sometimes be pyrrhic if it benefits the party who wins the dispute but relies on reasoning that erodes individual liberty in the longer term. In that context, while the outcome in the recent case of Chiles v. Salazar, Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies (decided March 31, 2026) was welcomed, the emphasis it placed on ‘viewpoint discrimination’ is unfortunate. It is one more step down the road to conceptualizing free speech as an application of the non-discrimination principle, rather than as an emanation of individual liberty.” (04/28/26)

    https://mises.org/mises-wire/free-speech-about-individual-liberty-not-viewpoint-discrimination

  • Is America a Racist Nation?

    Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
    by Wendy McElroy

    “When an entire country is called racist, the accusation has at least two parts: one, racism is built into the foundational structure or institutions of the nation, and, two, it is a defining belief of the population.” (04/28/26)

    https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/is-america-a-racist-nation/

  • Congress Keeps Choosing Inflation

    Source: The Daily Economy
    by Romina Boccia

    “The Republican Party’s victory lap over no tax on tips and no tax on overtime rings hollow, considering persistent public frustration with the cost of living. It doesn’t help that Trump’s tariff war and the war in Iran are further fueling rising prices. And voter frustration isn’t just about recent price changes. It’s also about the lasting damage from the inflation surge of 2021–2022, which pushed the overall price level permanently higher. There’s one cure, however, that Washington continues to miss. Inflation is increasingly driven by unsustainable budget policy, and politicians on both sides of the aisle keep pouring gasoline on the fiscal fire.” (04/28/26)

    https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/congress-keeps-choosing-inflation/

  • The Fading Trump Presidency

    Source: The Dispatch
    by Yascha Mounk

    “Predicting Donald Trump’s political demise has typically been a fool’s errand. Some of my smartest friends have declared his definitive fall from grace again and again, only to be proven wrong each and every time. … And yet, I have come to the tentative conclusion that this time may, finally, be different. For the past decade, Trump has dominated American politics like no other president in living memory; now, signs of that era coming to a close are suddenly multiplying. It is, as Saturday’s appalling assassination attempt on the president reminds us, impossible to see around the next historical corner. But it sure seems as though Trump’s hold over the country is finally slipping. This, to misquote Winston Churchill, no longer feels like the end of the beginning; it may be the beginning of the end.” (04/28/26)

    https://archive.is/R7ii2

  • A vote of liberty amid Gaza’s ashes

    Source: Christian Science Monitor
    by staff

    “One mark of a maturing democracy is a high proportion of independent voters, unbeholden to organized factions and attuned to unifying a civic community on shared hopes. In the Middle East, such sentiments have risen in recent years, from Iraq to Lebanon and perhaps soon in a newly liberated Syria. But in Gaza? After two years of devastating war? On Saturday, in an election held for the first time anywhere in Gaza in nearly two decades, voters showed a surprising degree of autonomy from the two major Palestinian parties. Balloting was held in only one city, Deir al-Balah, with more than 70,000 people, due to every other city in Gaza being flattened during fighting after the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. And voting was only for 15 seats in the municipal council.” (04/27/26)

    https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0427/A-vote-of-liberty-amid-Gaza-s-ashes

  • AI and the First Amendment

    Source: Liberalism.org
    by Corbin Barthold

    “‘Defendants fail to articulate why words strung together by an LLM are speech.’ With that curious line, one of the first judges to confront the question suggested, in the teeth of law and logic, that AI outputs might not be protected by the First Amendment. Consider what that would mean. If the outputs of large language models were not treated as protected expression, the government would have sweeping power to dictate what they can and cannot say — even what they must say. Already, sixty percent of Americans, and nearly three-quarters of those under thirty, use AI to find information. Those numbers will only grow. AI is fast becoming a medium through which hundreds of millions of people form opinions and make sense of the world. A government with control over AI outputs could twist that pursuit of truth — rewriting the past, shading the present, and warping the future.” (04/28/26)

    https://www.liberalism.org/p/ai-and-the-first-amendment

  • Iran Will Be Shorter Than Iraq. Will It Be Better?

    Source: The American Conservative
    by W James Antle III

    “It is the attempted political transformation of foreign countries, especially in the Middle East, that leads inevitably to American failure. George W. Bush wasn’t unsuccessful at overthrowing Saddam Hussein or the Taliban. He was unable to quickly replace them with anything better (or in the case of the Taliban, after 20 years in Afghanistan, really to replace them at all). Trump of course doesn’t want to devote much time or resources to a political transformation of Iran …. He is perfectly happy to stroll into Pottery Barn, smash everything on the shelf, and then leave someone else with the bill. The problem is that means you have to either leave behind a political vacuum or do business with the remnants of the regime you went to war with in the first place.” (04/28/26)

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/iran-will-be-shorter-than-iraq-will-it-be-better/

  • The Trauma and the Terror Among Us: The Global War on Terror’s Journey Home

    Source: TomDispatch
    by Andrea Mazzarino

    “America’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been receiving lots of scrutiny right now from journalists and ordinary citizens like me — and for good reason! Detaining people en route to their kids’ schools, in hospitals, or at work shouldn’t be the first thing that comes to mind these days when I think of ‘freedom,’ ‘civil rights’ or ‘America.’ Nor should spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to rebuild warehouses so that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, can hold people without charges in subhuman conditions. What do you think? In all of this mayhem, it’s easy to overlook new human rights violations because there are so many each day. Violations of the rule of law have become the air Americans breathe.” (04/28/26)

    https://tomdispatch.com/the-global-war-on-terrors-journey-home/

  • Elites and Their Contempt

    Source: Brownstone Institute
    by Rev. John F Naugle

    “Our political leaders view their own constituents with a sort of boredom or indifference. In the leadup to the [NFL] draft, Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania engaged in a number of public works projects designed to improve the area in preparation for the draft. Suddenly, our governments remembered that potholes aren’t supposed to be allowed to exist and that crime isn’t supposed to be allowed to happen. For three days, Pittsburgh had a heavily subsidized and highly functional public transit system, something that hasn’t existed the entirety of my lifetime. Any one of these projects could have been accomplished at any time, but the actual people who live there provided insufficient motivation for our leaders. Rather, what really mattered to them was looking good in front of millionaires, soon-to-be millionaires, and the powerful elites who would gather to party the night away with Nelly, Steve Aoki, and 2 Chainz.” 904/28/26)

    https://brownstone.org/articles/elites-and-their-contempt/

  • The Historical Sensibility of “Mad Men”

    Source: Liberal Currents
    by Joseph Stieb

    “As ‘Mad Men’ depicts, history reshapes people’s lives, perspectives, and interactions, often without them fully realizing that things have changed.” (04/28/26)

    https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-historical-sensibility-of-mad-men/

  • The true tax reduction is reduction in government outlays

    Source: Cobden Centre
    by Dr. Frank Shostak

    “Government uses various methods to divert wealth from wealth producers toward its activities. These methods include direct and indirect taxes and levies, monetary printing as a result of government borrowings from the central bank and borrowings from the private sector. The method of diverting wealth is of secondary importance. What matters here is that wealth is taken from wealth producers. The more that is taken, the higher the effective tax imposed on the wealth-generating private sector is going to be.” (04/28/26)

    https://www.cobdencentre.org/2026/04/the-true-tax-reduction-is-reduction-in-government-outlays/